Movie review: Passengers’ is a sci-fi trip to nowhere

Tuesday

Dec 20, 2016 at 3:47 PMDec 20, 2016 at 3:47 PM

Al Alexander More Content Now

What says Christmas more than love, especially when it’s between a “murdered” woman and her look-who’s-stalking “killer?” Kind of makes you feel all warm inside, doesn’t it? Ah, well, no, not really. In fact, it’s pretty silly, if not offensive. But then that’s the way “Passengers” rolls with its idiotic interplanetary romance involving a creepy Chris Pratt stalking a sleeping beauty in Jennifer Lawrence aboard a far-out spaceship that’s far out in space.

But not as far out as the folks who thought it a good idea to waste a fine director (“The Imitation Game’s” Morten Tyldum) and two of Hollywood’s most charismatic young actors on an inane space opera that eschews logic, not to mention a moral center. It results in a major malfunction in thinking. And nothing can save it; not the game performances by Lawrence and Pratt trying to succeed at keeping straight faces delivering reams of cornball dialogue courtesy of Jon Spaihts (“Prometheus”); nor the imaginative futuristic sets created by Guy Hendrix Dyas (“Inception”) that conjure a spaceship funkier than you’ve ever seen before.

The most frustrating aspect of “Passengers” is that it starts off intriguingly aboard the Avalon, a massive cruise ship traversing the galaxy on its way to Homestead 2, an Earth-like planet 120 years away. There are 5,000 people aboard, all of them sailing in suspended animation inside air-tight glass pods. We join them 30 years into the trip, when a meteor strike provides an early wake-up call for Pratt’s Jim Preston. He climbs from his pod thinking the ship is just four months from its final destination, but he soon learns he’s going to be living the next 90 years alone with only a legless android bartender (Michael Sheen, the best thing in the movie) to keep him company.

At first, it’s kind of fun being the only one awake. He has the run of the ship, playing with all the hi-tech gadgets, sleeping in the grand suite and going on shoplifting sprees inside the onboard stores. These early scenes are remarkably similar to the pilot for “The Last Man on Earth.” Jim even sports a long, bushy beard just like Will Forte’s on the TV show. In fact, they could be brothers. And like Forte’s Phil, Jim starts to get lonesome — and, yes, a little bit horny. After a year on his own, Jim can no longer stand his solitude and goes looking for a mate. Ah, yes, Lawrence’s strikingly beautiful Aurora Lane just might do. So Jim checks out her video profile to see if she likes kittens, apple pie and long walks in the rain. And wouldn’t you know it, she does. So, after weeks of sitting outside her pod door ogling her, he decides to wake her up; but not in a princely way with a kiss, but with a bag of tools. Apropos, because it’s around this time that you realize Jim IS a tool.

Let the whirlwind courtship begin. They dine together, smooch, go on long spacewalks and finally share a bed. Then, on her birthday of all night’s, Sheen’s Arthur lets slip that her pod didn’t open accidentally. She’s rightfully furious, calling Jim exactly what he is: A murderer. Now we’re onto something; an existential exploration of what it would be like to be awakened against your wishes and then having to forever share a spaceship with the man who wrote your lonely, miserable death sentence. But that’s not what the filmmakers have in mind. Instead, they go completely off the tracks by making “Passengers” a sort of “Titanic” of the heavens, sending the ship towards certain doom unless these two estranged exes can work together to make things right. It’s about this time that Laurence Fishburne’s yeoman shows up unexplained coughing up blood. Huh?

I won’t tell you the rest — not out of fear of spoiling the ending, but because you simply wouldn’t believe it. And there’s still like 45 minutes more to go — a short span in Earth time, but an eternity in “Passengers” time. I think I might have burned out the LED on my watch from checking it so often. When it finally reached its merciful end, the filmmakers actually expected me to cry and go aww. No chance; I couldn’t stop laughing.